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Ten Titans Of Technology

Can one limit oneself to just 10 of the greatest humans in the field of technology? Possibly not but if you thought hard and came up with a list of ten titans of technology, this could possibly be it. They are all entrepreneurs par excellence and deserve their prominent salaries or incomes they get. One common thread running through them all is that they are all computer professionals and worked hard to become the IT diploma holders beyond their textbooks.

Here is a classic case of missing the fast train at the last minute and getting on to slow train. He is as responsible as Bill Gates is in making Microsoft larger than anything the world has ever seen but does not get as much mention as does Bill Gate.

It is doubtful if Jeff Bezos had foreseen his website growing as large as its namesake the River, Amazon. What he started amazon.com as a way to sell books at reduced rates grew to become possibly the largest online retail vendor online.

A Russian é·mi·gré at the age of 6, Sergey Brin is one of the most affluent and young people in the world. A large number of people around the world are still baffled about Google’s ability to make billions of dollars but Sergey Brin, the co-founder, foresaw it two decades ago and started the process. It was a paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" to Stanford University that started it all.

This co-founder of Twitter is not a very well-known technocrat but the idea of limiting the thoughts to 143 characters caught the imagination of the people who made it an art to say all they wanted to say in a short narrative.

The original wonder man who created a behemoth called Apple, left it and was begged to return and on return, nurtured the behemoth to grow it even bigger. It is doubtful if anyone reading this does not possess a device that starts with “i” like iMac, iphone, iPad, iPod or iTunes but it is Steve Jobs who made it possible.

The other half of Google partnership who people know more about than it does Sergey Brin. He and Sergey Brin found that a webpage’s importance could be measured by using data gathered by webcrawler. This eventually led to the world’s first search engine, Google.

Steve was as instrumental in making Apple a household name as Steve Jobs or Ronald Wayne. Only he was friendlier than the other two and was liked by friends and strangers. Wheels of Zeus, founded in 2001 by Steve Wozniak, developed wireless GPS technology “to help everyday people find everyday thing much more easily”, in his own words

Had Wikipedia not been there, a considerable percentage of internet activity will not exist. The vision of Jimmy Wales made it possible for anyone with an internet connection to know anything he wanted to know in a matter of seconds. In an interview in 2004, he summed up his vision that led to Wikipedia, "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we're doing."

People who were inclined to participate in auctions were driven to it by the immediacy of online auction. The concept was visualized by Pierre Omidyar and he established eBay which has gone on to become one of the most visible entities in internet space. Omidyar started writing a computer code that would have a simple prototype which would enable a person-to-person auction method and the concept grew into the gargantuan eBay.

The only woman in this list is not here because of the necessity to have a token presence of a female. Google benefited from her work in innumerable ways. Her role in developing Google products like iGoogle, Gmail, Google Images, Google Maps et al is immense. When she became the CEO at Yahoo in 2012, she came into her own. Her move to stop employees from not coming to office but work from home reaped benefits for the company though the move was not without its critics.

Toni Meadows is a retired Business professor who now blogs about education and it's importance in society. He has visited several colleges in Melbourne and has written his observations on business courses and opinions about each one.